Omigosh, the weekend before last was soooo busy! There were, like, millions of people buying stuff online. Can you believe it? Oh, wait, it was the weekend after Thanksgiving. It's supposed to be a monster shopping weekend. So why were so many e-commerce sites unprepared?

According to Keynote Competitive Research, many retailers buckled when the first big wave of online holiday shoppers arrived. One-third of the Web sites Keynote monitors for its holiday retail index showed significant slowdowns on Black Friday (Nov. 23) and Cyber Monday (Nov. 26). The worst performing sites on Black Friday suffered up to a 400% slowdown.

Further, Keynote reports that the performance issues showed up particularly during product search and check-out processes. On a number of sites, check-out transactions took up to 2 minutes to process even on high-speed connections.

Keynote found most of the sites that had problems are traditional brick and mortar retailers that have invested in their Web presence relatively recently, such as Costco and Lowe’s. Companies with an established online history such as Barnes & Noble, Dell and Overstock.com fared very well despite the busy holiday traffic, Keynote reports.

What does this say about the industry?

I don’t think retailers were surprised by the volume of online shoppers over the post-Thanksgiving weekend. Weeks ago analysts and industry experts started touting crowd estimates for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are known to be two of the busiest online shopping days of the year. Plus the volume of online shoppers has been growing for years. How could retailers not be anticipating huge volumes of shoppers?

My guess is retailers were well aware - and hopeful - that customers would turn out in droves for the post-Thanksgiving specials. I think they were equally hopeful their Web sites would stand up to the crowds.

But “hopeful” is a far cry from “confident.” Retailers need to be more certain their Web infrastructure is able to handle seasonal loads. After all, the holiday shopping season can make or break a retailer’s year. There’s a lot riding on the next several weeks: Online shopping will represent about $30 billion in sales this holiday season, according to eMarketer, and about 30% of all holiday shopping will be done online this year, up strongly over last year, according to the National Retail Federation.

If ever there’s an industry in need of network optimization technology, it’s the retail industry. Load balancing, traffic management, application acceleration - these technologies can make a huge difference, as we all know.

The seasonal issue shouldn’t be underestimated, of course. Retailers don’t want to maintain a Web infrastructure built for super peak loads, when it would be overkill 11 months of the year. But what about all this capacity-on-demand stuff vendors talk about? Pay for it when you need it, not when you don’t? Isn’t that an obvious fix for a seasonal wave of traffic, or have I just bought into all the vendor marketing hype?

What solutions are best for retailers that want to perform well in peak times, without overspending during normal periods of online shopping? What do you think retailers should be doing to better prepare for the biggest shopping rush of the year? Please send your comments and I’ll share them in a future newsletter.

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.